Chapter 8

Chapter eight, My heart started to race. Where were they? Had they left me alone out here? No, my mom would never do that. Oh no! Then maybe something had happened to them. Maybe they went looking for me and got lost in the soggy, foggy forest. "Mom!" I shouted again. My voice echoed in the darkness. I could hear that I was starting to panic. Then one of the sleeping bags started to talk. I couldn't understand what it was saying, but it sounded like this. "Schmank, schmank."

I'd never heard that word before. i wondered what it meant. Was it an alien language? "Schmank," I whispered to myself. And then it hit me. Schmank rhymes with Hank. The sleeping bag was calling my name! "I'm over here," I yelled. "Next to the platform." Suddenly four heads popped out of the sleeping bags—Frankie, Emily, Cheerio, and my mom. "Whoa, am I glad to see you guys!" I said, almost crying with relief. "Why were you hiding? Did you see a bear?" "We were just trying to stay dry," my mom answered.

"I even made us hats out of wax paper," Emily said. "Cheerio hates wearing his." "Did you find the tent, Hank?" Frankie asked. "No offense to you, Emily, but I think that will keep us drier than your wax-paper hats." "Yes, I got it," I said, holding up the soaking tent. "You are the best, Zip!" Frankie crawled out of his sleeping bag. "I never doubted you. Let's put it up right away." "One small tent problem," I said. "I fell on it and broke it." Suddenly, there was a gust of wind followed by a giant burst of hard rain. It was as if a cloud above us had opened up and emptied itself out. And then there was a big crash. Our lantern was broken now, too. Emily screamed and dived back into my mom's sleeping bag. "Hank, how badly is the tent broken?" my mom asked. "We need shelter... now." "I'll figure this out, Mom," I said. "You just take care of Emily and Cheerio."

My mom disappeared back into her sleeping bag, leaving Frankie and me to build a shelter. I slipped the tent poles out, hoping that at least one of them hadn't broken. No such luck. I had four short poles that would be perfect if I were building a tent for Cheerio. But they sure wouldn't work to build a tent that we could all fit into. "If we could put all these pieces together to make one long pole, we could build some sort of tepee," I suggested. "Great thinking," Frankie said. "That's using the old Zipzer brain. Except how are we going to connect the poles? You don't happen to have any glue on you, do you?" I looked around the platform, searching for an idea. I saw Emily's bag, our red-and-white cooler, Frankie's backpack, my dad's emergency kit, and my mom's knitting bag. Wait a minute, Hank. Back up. Dad's emergency kit—maybe there's something in there that I could use.

I jumped across the platform, grabbed the kit, and unzipped it. There were enough first-aid supplies in there to open a hospital. Rubber gloves, batteries, needles and thread, light sticks, gauze, adhesive tape, anti-itch cream, a silver emergency blanket, and a pack of twenty- five Band-Aids of every size and shape. My dad always says "be prepared," and boy, was he ever! I took the light sticks, the Band-Aids, the gauze pads, and the adhesive tape and ran back to Frankie. "What's all that for?" he asked. "Dr. Zipzer reporting to surgery," I said. "I'm going to operate on the pole." I snapped the center of one of the light sticks. It put out a soft green glow. That was good enough for us to see what we were doing. Frankie matched the four pieces of pole together, while I ripped open the gauze pads. I

wrapped a bunch of them around the spots where the poles connected. "You hold this tight," I told Frankie. "Don't let go." Then I grabbed the twenty-five Band-Aids and tore each one out of its wrapper. One by one, I peeled the paper off the sticky parts and placed them over the gauze until I couldn't see it anymore. "You can let go now," I told Frankie. "It should hold." "I don't think so, Zip. The connection is still too weak. I think we need to double it up with adhesive tape." "Okay," I said. "And maybe I can use the light stick as a splint."